A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel

by Levin, Edmund

  Brazul felt he was in possession of valuable, sensational information. As it happened, he also knew Margolin well. They had worked together at two of Kiev’s progressive newspapers. Margolin regarded Brazul with a mixture of admiration and condescension, remarking that “his work was notable for its quixotic character, in the best sense of the term.” When his friend told him that he was on the trail of Andrei’s killer, Margolin was skeptical. Brazul was honest and well intentioned, but he was no detective. So Margolin at first refused when Brazul suggested setting up a meeting with Cheberyak, but Margolin did visit Fenenko to share what Brazul had told him. “No sooner than I had mentioned the name of Cheberyak,” Margolin recalled, “than Fenenko repeated literally the same words I had heard from [Brazul]: ‘Cheberyak knows everything about this case.’ ” Fenenko was still tight-lipped about specifics, but Margolin correctly understood that he meant Cheberyak was not just a witness who “knew” things but rather was an accomplice to the crime.

  Fenenko’s office was in the building of the Kiev Circuit Court and Margolin had some other business to take care of at the court that day, December 3. As he passed Fenenko’s office again, someone pointed out “a small, thin restless figure” waiting to be interrogated. It was Vera Cheberyak. “The upper portion of her head and one eye were bandaged,” Margolin recalled in his memoir of the case. “It was sufficient, however, to see only that one eye to gain an idea that she was a dangerous woman. She was casting feverish, hateful looks in every direction, scrutinizing everybody suspiciously.” Margolin, like so many people who crossed Cheberyak’s path, appears to have been overwhelmed at the mere sight of her, by the malevolence her physical presence conveyed. Margolin had not intended to get personally involved in the investigation. In the event that Beilis was indicted, he would be one of the defendant’s attorneys, so it would only be prudent to keep his distance from potential witnesses. But now his fascination with Cheberyak was beginning to overpower his caution.

  The next day Margolin told Brazul that he would meet with Cheberyak, though only if measures were taken to protect his identity. As it happened, he was going on business to Kharkov, about three hundred miles east of Kiev, and could meet with Cheberyak there. Margolin later claimed, unconvincingly, that he merely wanted to avoid having Cheberyak find him in Kiev and pester him, but he must have known that what he was about to do carried tremendous risks: it could lead to the unmasking of Andrei’s killers and exonerate Beilis. Or it could end in catastrophe for the defense, lending credence to the idea that cunning Jews were secretly conniving to pin the case on a Christian woman.

  Kiev’s Jewish leaders maintained their wariness, as Fenenko found when he officially deposed Margolin’s father, David, who was the vice chairman of a group known as the Representation for Jewish Welfare of the Kiev Executive Authority. (The very name of this body, as cumbersome in Russian as it is in English, suggested that Jews were an alien presence, requiring something in the nature of a foreign mission to their own government. Indeed, Jews were officially classified by the regime as an “alien” people.) Rumors had apparently reached the authorities that certain Jews might be meddling in the case. Fenenko, almost certainly on orders from above, questioned the elder Margolin about whether this allegation had any basis in fact. The industrialist, in all sincerity, assured Fenenko that no such unofficial investigation was being conducted and that he himself would oppose such an effort because the matter was the responsibility of the proper authorities. But Fenenko himself had by this time lost faith in the authorities, felt powerless to resolve the cases, and was, in fact, encouraging the elder Margolin’s son to do whatever he could to push the investigation forward and prevent an innocent man from being indicted.

  Arnold Margolin arrived in Kharkov by express train on December 7 and checked into a suite at the luxurious Grand Hotel where he presented his internal passport, which all citizens needed for travel, copying down the requisite information in the register, including that he was “of the Jewish faith.” Brazul arrived on a different train with Cheberyak, having treated her to a first-class compartment, and secured her a room in the somewhat less-grand Hotel Hermitage. Accompanying them was a former police officer, Alexei Vygranov, disguised in a university student’s uniform, who had been Krasovsky’s assistant and was now helping Brazul with his investigation.

  Margolin was given to mocking Brazul’s pretensions to be a detective, but his own efforts to conceal his identity were remarkably clumsy. He received Cheberyak in his own rooms at a hotel where he had registered under his own name. Brazul presented the esteemed gentleman to Cheberyak as a member of the Kharkov city Duma, failing to explain why a resident of the city would be staying in a hotel.

  The meeting lasted a little less than an hour. Cheberyak, according to Margolin, immediately took charge of the conversation. She removed her bandage, displaying to all the gash on her head, and claimed she had been beaten by Pavel Mifle, who had poisoned her children, and declared her determination to get revenge on him. (Her story varied—she had also told Brazul that Mifle’s mother, Maria, had poisoned the children.) She presented herself, in Margolin’s words, as a “noble avenger,” declaring, “I am prepared to let myself perish but I will destroy Mifle.” She repeated what Margolin had already heard from Brazul—that Andrei had been killed by his stepfather, his uncle, Mifle, and others, and that she was planning to meet with a prisoner in Kharkov who had more information about the crime.

  On their return to Kiev, Margolin and Brazul compared their impressions. Brazul believed that Cheberyak’s story, if not entirely true, had a great deal of truth in it. True, she never met with her supposed informant in Kharkov, about whom she had been frustratingly vague, but that did not necessarily undermine her story. Margolin, on the other hand, was emphatic in his conviction that Cheberyak’s story was a total lie. He came away from the Kharkov trip confident that Cheberyak had been directly involved in Andrei’s murder. Cheberyak, he felt, had the demeanor of “a person who was being hunted, who sensed danger” because investigators were on her trail. But in concocting a convoluted lie, had Vera Cheberyak possibly let slip part of the truth about Andrei’s murder? During their meeting, Margolin had mostly kept his silence, but he did probe Cheberyak about the supposed motive behind Andrei’s death. Why, he asked, had Andrei been killed? Andrei, Cheberyak claimed, had been eliminated by Mifle’s villainous “gang of thieves.” But why, Margolin pressed. Because, she said, the boy knew what they were up to: he was a “dangerous witness.”

  During a visit to Kiev around this time, Gruzenberg got wind of Margolin’s involvement with Brazul and was greatly displeased. He told Margolin that he was taking unnecessary risks. “Why place our untarnished case in jeopardy?” he argued. The accusers lacked credible evidence. They “would welcome the opportunity” Margolin was affording them to declare that the witnesses for the defense were tainted and their testimony the product of a Jewish lawyer’s conspiracy. The trial would not settle their argument. Decades later Margolin would still be insisting that his “offensive” tactics had been a boon to the defense, while Gruzenberg continued to maintain that the consequences of the amateurish investigation had been disastrous.

  What is indisputable is that the courtroom confrontation between Arnold Margolin and Vera Cheberyak would become a sensational highlight of the trial. Cheberyak, of course, could not have known that the clandestine meeting in Kharkov would lead to a headline-making moment around the world some two years hence. But before she returned to Kiev, she had taken steps toward turning the secret trip to her advantage. She was not going to give the important gentleman she had met any chance to deny their encounter. She removed a poster from the wall of her Kharkov hotel room and wrote her name on the wallpaper. She also mailed a postcard to her husband to prove the date she had been there. The rare missive to Vasily Cheberyak from his despised and dreaded wife read, “Thank God, everything is fine.”

  Toward the end of December, it became clear to a despairing Fenenk
o that he had failed to thwart the effort to indict Beilis for the murder of Andrei Yushchinsky. He had been confident that, in the course of his investigation, the absurdity of the charges would become so overwhelmingly self-evident that the case would be dropped. But now Chaplinsky stepped up the pressure on him to declare his investigation complete, a legal requirement before an indictment could be drafted. The prosecutor undoubtedly desired to start off the new year with a case that would gain him national renown.

  Chaplinsky, however, was still concerned by the scantiness of the evidence, which he himself had more than once admitted was “not completely firm.” More evidence quickly had to be found—or fabricated. To this end, there now emerged the strange partnership that would shape the entire case. Grigory Chaplinsky, chief prosecutor of the Kiev Judicial Chamber, would work in concert with Vera Cheberyak, the terror of Lukianovka and leading suspect in Andrei’s murder. Later they would meet and conspire. At this point, though, the collaboration was unspoken, arising naturally to fulfill the needs of the ambitious official and the criminal sociopath. In these days, the week before Christmas 1911, each of them executed a separate and mutually reinforcing plan to firm up the case.

  On December 20, Vera Cheberyak sent off her hapless husband, Vasily, to Investigator Fenenko with a new story to tell. Vasily was now completely in Cheberyak’s thrall. He would do whatever she wanted. Just a few months earlier he had longed to see her arrested. Now he was prepared to relate whatever lies she instructed him to tell in order to deflect suspicion away from her.

  As he sat down in front of the investigator, Vasily did not rush to tell his new story. He was of noble stock and, though poorly paid (46 rubles 50 kopeks a month), he was proud of being a civil servant, which gave him elevated standing among the meaner denizens of Lukianovka. His self-esteem, dependent on such minuscule differences in status, was in need of shoring up. Even with Zhenya and Andrei in their graves, it was important to him to express his disdain for his son’s friend. His Zhenya, he said, had indeed played regularly with Andrei Yushchinsky, but the friendship, he wanted it known, was “a state of affairs that I did not like at all.” Andrei’s family were “simple people,” he explained, “and I did not want my boy to go around with that kind of boy.” Having made sure to place his dead son on a higher plane than the boy’s dead friend, he proceeded to recount the tale his wife had given him.

  In the preceding nine months, questioned repeatedly by investigators, none of the Cheberyaks—not Vasily, not Vera, not any of their three children—had mentioned Mendel Beilis. Now, however, Vasily made a dramatic claim. Several days before the discovery of Andrei’s body, he said,

  Zhenya came running into the apartment … and he told me that he had been playing with Andrusha Yushchinsky on the clay grinder in the Zaitsev brick factory and that Mendel Beilis had seen them there and chased after them.

  Mendel Beilis’s sons, he said, were standing nearby, laughing. Zhenya, in this new account, did not say he saw what happened to Andrei but, thanks to Vasily Cheberyak’s new assertion, the prosecution would now be able to argue that while Zhenya had escaped the clutches of the Jew, Andrei had not. Chaplinsky could feel relieved that he at last had a relatively respectable-looking witness who ensnared Beilis in a story that put him under suspicion.

  Chaplinsky still faced a nagging problem in the autopsy reports, which lent little support to the ritual-murder theory. The first autopsy, performed by the city coroner, A. M. Karpinsky, failed to confirm the ritual-murder scenario in any way; its results were consistent with a brutal, senseless murder. A report on the second autopsy, which was delivered on April 25, found that the primary cause of death was “the body’s almost complete exsanguination,” or loss of blood (a dubious conclusion, as noted earlier, likely reflecting pressure from Chaplinsky, and one that would be vigorously contested by the defense). Still, in the report there was no definitive confirmation that the goal of the crime had been to drain the body of blood.

  Fenenko was almost surely ordered by Chaplinsky to bring in for questioning Dr. Nikolai Obolonsky and the anatomist N. N. Tufanov, who had performed the second autopsy. Fenenko was compelled to ask both men an entirely unwarranted and speculative question: “If blood was extracted from Yushchinsky’s body, from what wounds would it have been most convenient to gather it?” On December 23, the specialists obliged by responding: “Given that the most profuse bleeding was in the left temple region … and also from the right side of the neck … one must assume that it would have been most convenient to collect blood from Yushchinsky’s body from these wounds, if blood actually was collected.” This was rather flimsy stuff, but better than nothing. At least the experts had been coaxed into considering the draining of blood as if it were a possible scenario.

  The year closed with an event that would change the course of case. On December 31, 1911, Nikolai Krasovsky found himself disgraced, when he was suddenly and summarily dismissed from his position for supposed misconduct as a police official in Khodorkov. Some years earlier, it was alleged, he had detained a peasant named Kovbasa without sufficient cause. (Suddenly the tsarist authorities were getting finicky about improper detentions.) Krasovsky’s enemies had not been content to let the detective quietly resume his former life; the officials fomenting the blood accusation had decided to exact their revenge, stripping him of his livelihood and reputation. Yet as acts of revenge go, this one was remarkably counterproductive. Krasovsky previously had no intention of resuming his involvement in the most frustrating case of his career, but he now felt himself compelled to do so. He set about planning his return to Kiev to reclaim his good name by proving the case against Andrei’s killers.

  7

  “Who Is a Hero?”

  For Mendel Beilis the new year got off to a promising, if painful, start. On January 4, 1912, in his seventh week of solitary confinement, a guard opened the door and told him to get ready to leave his cell. The investigator wanted to see him. They were taking him to the courthouse.

  Kiev was in the midst of a brutal cold spell, and during Beilis’s long walk down the city’s streets in tattered shoes with holes in the soles, his already badly ulcerated feet became frostbitten. He limped into Vasily Fenenko’s office in terrible pain but was elated to learn why he had been summoned: the investigation, Fenenko told him, was nearly complete. Beilis himself was the final witness. Upon hearing the news, he thanked God that his ordeal might soon be coming to an end. Five months earlier Fenenko had, with such heartfelt sorrow, sent him to prison, but assured him that his investigation would reveal the truth. Now Beilis was filled with hope. He understood that charging him, of all people, with “ritual” murder made no sense at all. “I am a completely unreligious Jew,” he told Fenenko in his brief deposition. “I always work on Saturdays … I only go to Synagogue once a year, on the Day of Atonement.” Regarding the one new substantive claim against him, he formally denied that he had ever told his former cellmate Kozachenko to poison any witnesses. Then he was led away on the long, agonizing walk back to the prison, returning to his cell, he later remembered, “with frozen feet … and a happy heart.”

  Fenenko, though, was appalled that the end of his investigation had resulted not in the dropping of the case but in Beilis’s imminent indictment. The day after their meeting, he signed the final page of the sheaf of depositions and reports and sent it off to the prosecutor’s office. No rational or honest prosecutor would indict a man based on the material contained in those pages, but by now Fenenko knew he had lost his battle against the fomenters of the blood accusation and had no choice but to let the machine of the criminal justice system grind into its next gear. Beilis, however, was simply happy that the process had finally moved on to the next step.

  When he returned to his cell Beilis removed his shoes and saw that his feet were badly swollen. He showed them to a guard, who told him to just wait until they got better, but his feet got worse by the minute. Finally, another guard barked at him to get up and hurry to the inf
irmary, in another building. But Beilis could not walk. The guard, annoyed, just kept shouting, “Move on!” Beilis was paralyzed by pain. Finally a prisoner found some rags and bound them around his knees: Beilis crawled on them across the snow and ice to the infirmary. There he was welcomed to a kind of heaven. A compassionate physician’s assistant gave him his first real bath in months and prepared a bed with fresh linens. Beilis slept thirty-six hours straight.

  He awoke, unfortunately, to the ministrations of someone far less kind. Mendel Beilis would meet relatively few aggressive anti-Semites during his years in prison, but the doctor who operated on his feet was one of them. “Well, now you know for yourself what it feels like to be cut up,” the physician said as he punctured and drained the sores in what seemed to Beilis an intentionally leisurely fashion. “You can imagine how Andrusha felt when you were stabbing him and drawing his blood.” After the excruciating procedure, Beilis remained in the relative bliss of the infirmary for several days, but he was released before his feet were fully healed. Apparently an important person was coming from St. Petersburg to inspect the facility and it would not do to present the most infamous prisoner in the empire laid up in bed with bad feet.